ONE REASON THE SCAVENGER-SAVANT BECK HANSEN KEEPS TURNING UP ON millennium lists: He was first to seize the changes wrought by the Web--which shattered linear information into far-flung and interrelated links--and apply them to making music.

His work, particularly 1996's Odelay, the most wildly praised and puzzled-over album of the last decade, replaces the boilerplate narrative devices that have ruled lyric writing since the days of Irving Berlin with a language built from disconnected blips, a virtuoso shorthand of sampled references, winking clichés, and fleeting images ("drive-by body pierce," "she's got a cigarette on each arm"). Sifting through the dots and dashes and cell-phone chatter, the twenty-nine-year-old guitarist/singer/programmer mirrors the torrents of media streaming past urban dwellers daily but resists the urge to make these random noises signify any specific thing. His music has been derided as mongrel gibberish and hailed as the most precise rendering of restless po-mo anomie. And it's infected every corner of pop--from innovative hip-hop producers like Kool Keith to the ice queen Björk to spin master Moby.

But Beck isn't completely radical. His genius lies less in the invention of brave new realms than in the smushing together of old ones. He winds up with fantastical crossbreeds: hip-hop raga prayer drones or twelve-bar blues contorted to evoke a menacing junkyard apocalypse. Unlike the copycat auteurs who throw every stray oddity into the soup and pray for digital voodoo, Beck actually understands what he's skimming--he knows the structure of the Dust Bowl ballad, the specific etiquette of the hip-hop taunt.

On his two-year tour for Odelay, Beck had to translate the exploratory atmosphere that inspired his recordings into live performance. After several months, he and his band were ripping through gloriously unhinged and highly improvisational treatments of his songs. Beck's new album, Midnite Vultures, due out in November, builds on that energy: It's the cultures-in-collision vibe of Odelay as interpreted by a polished, audaciously rocking soul revue. And yet, like everything Beck does, the high concept never strays far from the root, whether it's Robert Johnson calling out hellhounds or the elemental grind of two turntables and a microphone.